Pasolini's The Savage Father:
Colonialism as a "Structure that Wants
to be Another Structure."

by Pasquale Verdicchio
Pier Paolo Pasolini, writer, film-maker and essayist, made his debut
in 1948 through a small volume of poems written in the Friulian
language of his mother. This act of writing in the language of a
subculture was the first instance in what would be the author's
life-long engagement and interest in subaltern cultures. In the late
‘40s, as a teacher and active member of the Italian Communist Party
(PCI) in the Friuli (then an impoverished area of Northeastern Italy),
Pasolini began to suffer the animosity of normative forces of the time.
His pedagogical and organizational activities among workers and
peasants pressed a local priest to take action against Pasolini. He
was denounced as a homosexual threat to his young male pupils, an
accusation that resulted not only in Pasolini's being relieved of his
teaching post, but also in his expulsion from the PCI in 1949. That
series of events brought into greater focus the apparently
contradictory dimensions of Pasolini's life: homosexuality, Marxism,
and Catholicism, represent a crucially active set of circumstances that
colored Pasolini's art and his relationship with Italian society until
his assassination/murder in 1975.
From 1949 to 1977, two years after his murder, Pier Paolo Pasolini
was the subject of approximately 33 trials on a variety of charges:
From "offensiveness toward good customs and to the common sense of
morality and decency" (for Mamma Roma, 1962); to "contempt toward the
state religion, under the pretext of cinematographic description, by
mocking the figure and value of Christ through musical commentary,
mimicry, dialogue etc." (for La Ricotta, 1963); to the representation
of "scenes offensive to the public decency in the depiction of
intercourse between the guest and the maid, the woman of the house, and
with the male components of the household, as well as the homosexual
tendencies of the head of the household, the father, which are contrary
to every moral value, social and familial." (for Teorema, 1968); to
calls of "blasphemous, subversive, pornographic, indecent, etc." (for
The Decameron, 1971); to charges of "a film full of obscenities ...
nothing more than a series of vulgar exhibitions of sexual organs, all
very clearly photographed." (for Arabian Nights, 1973).
While all the charges are aimed at what may be most obviously
offensive to a conservative sector of the population, they hide a more
insidious challenge to cultural and ideological diversity behind
catch-phrases such as "common decency" and "public morality." What is
achingly apparent in any of Pasolini films is that the author does not
merely seek to shock but aims to present a world view that is
ideologically conflictual to, and compromising for, the dominant
culture.
Pasolini proposes and produces art "as an exploration of the unsaid in
common and official ideological discourses." The effectiveness of his
art lies in his portrayal of "something that scandalizes for its being
what it is. It scandalizes because of its nature: because for one
reason or another it is a diverse nature." (Ferrero, 2) Diverse is my
translation of "diverso", which would also literally translate to
"different," and this term would become for Pasolini representative of
a central concept. Used in Italian as a colloquialism in reference to
homosexuality, Pasolini set himself the task of diffusing the term of
its negative connotations by infusing it with a sense of cultural
importance and militancy. Largely biographical at its inception, the
concept acquired cultural and political dimensions by which the author
sought to bridge various manifestations of the diverse (homosexuality,
sub-proletarianism, Third World cultures) in a common oppositional
front against officialdom.
According to Pasolini, people's physicality, their bodies and
sexual organs, identify them as peripheral products of specific
socio-economic conditions and/or a-historic conditions. Therefore,
since "the language of action or simply of offensive presence [is a]
stage of pre-revolutionary contestation," official culture finds it
necessary to silence or censor these bodies and render them invisible.
The uninhibited display of sub-proletarian bodies one witnesses in
most of Pasolini's films is offensive to societal norms because it
offers a code of being that demystifies the ideal body of bourgeois
representation and proposes (sub)alternatives to it. Aside from a sign
of potentially revolutionary value, the "language of action"
represented by those bodies is also representative of a diversity of
spoken language, the dialects, which, as an infraction of accepted
cultural codes, signals a non-negotiable threat contained within the
potentiality of subaltern self-expression.
Pasolini, himself a diverse yet bourgeois intellectual, becomes aware
of his own need to give up the standardized language of Italian
intellectual culture and become initiated into a revolutionary one.
His is double initiation: first into the language of Marxism, and then
into the language of subaltern cultures (such as Friulano). The two
are integrated and then restated in the author's own social critique
which, through literary and filmic production, privileges specific
sites (the body of the sub-proletariat, for example) through which to
initiate a discourse of subalternity, exclusion, oppression, and
confrontation. Though not immune to the seduction and effects of
dominant cultural canons, Pasolini's works are an attempt to dissipate
the officiality of particular discourses by juxtaposing them to
disparate alternative elements.
Accattone (1961) marks Pier Paolo Pasolini's venture into film-making,
the author/film-maker's initiation and exploration of socio-political
discourses through visual vocabulary. Accattone is the first of many
forays in Pasolini's methodology of subaltern cultural synthesis. In
that, the first of his films, elements of the dominant cultural code,
such as the verses of Dante or the music of Bach, are used as
background to the actions and bodies of sub-proletarian characters.
These acts of transgression are not easily forgiven by the keepers of
traditional cultural codes. As a result, the bodies scripted by
Pasolini in his films, and the language that emanates from them,
attract the negative attention of the scrupulous defenders of the
"common good." Beginning his research among the "ragazzi" of the
borgate of Rome and the Neapolitan subaltern culture that had already
appeared in his books, Pasolini quickly moves to consider the
conditions of "Third world" populations as parallel representations of
a subaltern revolutionary storehouse. Within this context, he develops
an analysis of filmic language that aims to complement his other
practical and theoretical explorations into written and oral languages.
However painfully aware he may be of the distance that separates the
various spheres of linguistic expression, Pasolini works toward
devising a visual vocabulary through which these parallel realities
become at times bridged.
Consciously addressing a potential diversity of registers, and their
value as alternative cultural space and instruments of resistance,
Pasolini would seem to touch upon what we now-a-days refer to as
postcolonial studies. Almost a decade before his first African film An
African Orestes (1970), The Savage Father, a script located in Africa,
sets the ground upon which to approach the unfolding reality of
post-colonialism concurrently with the rooting of consumerism in the
industrialized world.
Abjuration and Confrontation
While always keen to identify populations in whose hands the undoing
of his own bourgeoisie culture may rest, later in his life, Pasolini
would critique his own blindness vis-à-vis the overly idealistic
representations of subalternity that had populated some of his films.
In a series of films which Pasolini himself dubbed his "Trilogy of
Life," the author's scope was indeed to represent the revolutionary
power of sub-proletarian bodies, and highlight their potential through
the manipulation of highly imaginative canonical narratives of tales
and fables, The Decameron (1970), Canterbury Tales (1971), and Arabian
Nights (1974). In his "Abjuration from The Trilogy of Life," (1975)
Pasolini comes to deny these films as an error in judgment. (Pasolini
1976, 71) For those who had known Pasolini and his works, this should
not have come as a surprise, but for most his abjuration further
demonstrated Pasolini's erraticism. As the following verses from "A
Desperate Vitality"(1964, 1996) demonstrate, Pasolini had perceived his
position in Italy quite well:
Death lies not
in being unable to communicate
but in the failure to continue being understood.
(14)
In his abjuration, Pasolini takes a rather cynical stance through
which he claims that the bodies represented in the "Trilogy" were to
have stood in opposition to the subculture of mass media and
consumerism. In fact, he concluded, those bodies had been doomed long
before he made the films, the perpetrator being none other than the
famed "economic boom" of the 60s, a phenomenon that threw Italy into
the realm of post-industrialism and neo-capitalism. It was this
transition into hypernationalism that Pasolini blamed for Italy's
cultural and anthropological deterioration. Not one to take "death"
lightly, Pasolini developed this "failure" into feigned adaptation and
conformism, as in this "Communiqué to ANSA [stylistic choice]" (1971):
I have ceased to be an original poet, it costs
freedom: a stylistic system is too exclusive.
I have adopted accepted literary schemes
to be free. For practical reasons, of course.
However, criticism of his work, and accusations of a nostalgia for
an irretrievable past, continued to be leveled against him. Pasolini's
response to those who called for him to deal with the problems of
contemporary society, to show a conscience of the present, is the
rhetorical abjuration of the "Trilogy" which in turn sets the stage for
his last project: Salò (1975).
A loose adaptation of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, Salò is Pasolini's
strategy to revive the last days of Fascism at the close of W.W.II, as
an instrument by which to suggest a matrix for contemporary fascism's
homogenization and objectification of humanity. The degradation of
bodies, their use and abuse, torture, sadism, the corruption of
eroticism and sexual relations, are the subjects of Salò. Pasolini
believed that the fascism that had found fertile ground during the
early to mid part of the century had not disappeared but had merely
changed form. Consumerism, the new fascism, had, in his opinion,
decimated the Italian sub-proletariat and it threatened to decimate the
populations of the so-called Third World. Of course, Salò was no less
susceptible to censorship than his previous works. While Pasolini's
early works had been threatening for their portrayal of the
pre-revolutionary potential of the sub-proletariat, Salò is subversive
in its out and out identification of the perverse power of fascism and
its lingering effects. That fascism works its spell by insinuating
itself as protector of accepted norms, order and clarity is addressed
ironically by Pasolini in the previously quoted "Communiqué to ANSA."
Freedom through "accepted ... schemes" is, of course, not freedom at
all, and with Salò Pasolini succeeds in subverting this statement as
well. This he does by giving prominence to the narrative schemes of
fascism. By having each set of atrocities prefaced by the narrative
voice of the fascist bourgeois captors, Pasolini unveils the inherent
violence of that ideology. The scheme in Salò is much more direct than
in other films and, as the fascist-initiated story-telling degenerates
into the subjugation of the unspoken and unspeaking subjects, the
"practical reasons" of Pasolini's rhetoric come to light.
Thus, one distinction between the "Trilogy" and Salò can be made
at the level of communication. The works of the "Trilogy" still
preserve a hope in the dialectic potential of the eroticism of
sub-proletarian bodies, as communicative of their condition. Salò, on
the other hand, dismisses any chance for communication through the
total objectification of sexuality. The dialectic is wholly disrupted
and interjected for the sole function and benefit of the system of
consumption that is fascism. Communication, or the lack thereof,
defines eroticism and pornography respectively. Salò becomes
Pasolini's accusatory finger by which he links fascism, censorship, and
pornography.
The film elicited a negative reaction even from those who had in the
past been supportive of Pasolini. Italo Calvino, in "Sade is Within
Us," suggests that
A "moral" effect can be drawn from Sade only if the "accusation" keeps
its finger pointed not at the others but at ourselves. The "place of
action" can only be in our conscience (111).
Complaining about how Pasolini was wholly discounting of Sade's
intentions in The 120 Days of Sodom, and of how poorly that text
transfers as a vehicle for the recounting of the last days of fascism
in war torn Italy, Calvino suggests that the film-maker was out of
touch with the world in which he lived. But Pasolini was painfully
aware of his inescapable situation as a privileged bourgeois
intellectual in society, and the effect that the maintenance of the
status quo has on those considered expendable. Calvino's suggestions
may in fact be symptomatic of the very loss of diversity in
contemporary society, and the conviction that pedagogically we are
restricted to the lessons of the dominant culture.
Learning from Failure
Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote Il padre selvaggio (The Savage Father) in
1963, during the blasphemy trial for his film La ricotta. Due to the
fact that this script was never made into a film, the critical
literature refers to it as an "unrealized" screenplay, which almost
automatically relegates the work to a secondary status. The reasons
given for this are of course the trial, and various problems associated
with finding financial support for the project. Pasolini himself
provides a justification for its non-actualization as a film in a short
address that follows the text and precedes the poem "And Africa?" that
closes the post-humously published script here translated. (Einaudi,
1975)
The court case against Ricotta for blasphemy prevented me from making
Il padre selvaggio. The pain it gave me - and I tried to express it in
these ingenuous verses of "E l'Africa?" - still gives me pain. I
dedicate the script of Padre selvaggio to the Ministry of Justice and
to the judge who condemned me.
Often referred to by critics as "Pasolini's most ambitious work" among
his meditations on the "Third World," The Savage Father holds an
integral but not as yet fully appreciated position in his oeuvre.
While it remained a screenplay, The Savage Father's integrity as a work
of art stands beyond the categories of film and script, and somewhere
between them. Written just after his essay "La resistenza negra"
(Black Resistance), the introduction to an anthology of Black writers
published in 1961, The Savage Father expands on what may be Pasolini's
most extended theoretical statement about the Third World. "La
resistenza negra" relates Black resistance to the Italian Resistance to
fascism of W.W.II, thus establishing for Pasolini an extra determinant
in his turning his gaze toward the Third World. Noting that the
Resistance has receded into the past and lost its impact on "our
world," Pasolini identifies within the Black Resistance the instance
for a permanent revolution: "it does not seem that it will finish as it
has finished here for us...". Pasolini's faith in the Black Resistance
is based on the belief that there has not been a "split between
resistance and Resistance." In other words, the political movement for
national autonomy and the struggle for social justice are one and the
same.
Contrary to most commentators, I would like to suggest that it is of
little importance that The Savage Father was never produced, and that
its relevance resides in part most effectively in that fact. As a
document of ideological pertinence, The Savage Father stands in that
ambiguous and contradictory space of Pasolini's relationship with the
"diverso." The Savage Father signals the beginning of a research and
exploration of form, structure, and language that Pasolini had begun to
discuss in a series of essays on cinema, "The Cinema of Poetry" being
the first, written in 1965. These meditations continued with "The
Screenplay as a ‘Structure that Wants to be Another Structure,' (1965)
in which the writer/director reflects precisely on the viability of a
structure that is neither literary nor cinematic but that
"[continuously alludes] to a developing cinematographic work." That
essay and The Savage Father are representative of Pasolini's
considerations of filmic language at that point in time, and of a
transition/bridging of literary texts and/to visual texts..
* * *
Indicative of Pasolini's concern for a pedagogical relationship with
the Third World, The Savage Father juxtaposes a European figure in
relationship to the inhabitants of an unnamed African country (most
likely the Congo, given the historical moment in which the script was
written). The story revolves around the arrival of a European teacher
in a village to teach a class of young men. It indirectly addresses
the presence of neo-colonialism and the cultural resistance of the
Africans to both the foreign troops and the colonial educational system
(though the new teacher supposedly represents a progressive European
presence). In the classroom the resistance is broken down by the
teacher's introduction of poetry which, while heightening the pupils'
sense of their own culture, also seems to establish a cross-cultural
mode of communication. Davidson, the pupil on whom the script
concentrates, is enraptured by the introduction of the powerful medium
of poetry. As a result, he reaches a moment of self-awareness and
awareness of his environment that, while on a visit to his village,
causes him to participate in a rebellion against the European forces in
residence there. Poetry, it seems, has provided him with a new way to
see the world. His actions, while apparently on the threshold of
insanity, are a result of his increase engagement of the images of his
country and peoples as enabled by the poetic process.
The acquisition of a poetic rapport with one's own culture is
exemplary of the Gramscian pedagogic theory that so influenced
Pasolini, and which goes to illustrate, within this short text,
Pasolini's own critique of pedagogical approaches in general. Poetry
provides a link with the student's own experience and short-circuits
the relationship with the official culture that originally presents it
in the context of the classroom. As an illustration of the need to
break with colonial forms and colonized expression, at the beginning of
The Savage Father, the teacher assigns various compositions to the
students, which they complete and return. The resulting essays are a
disaster because they are still written under an oppressive force. The
themes are unqualifiable: rhetorical thoughts that, having lost their
usual form, are even sometimes ungrammatical. [... The teacher] yells
at them, telling them that they are no longer under the authority and
the rhetoric of the colonialists: "they are free, free, they are free!"
(Pasolini 1999, 13). The colonial educational system, far from
"educating" in the Gramscian sense, in other words initiating a pupil
to his own culture, has imposed a rhetorical form that worked
effectively to bury the students' personal experiences and any manner
in which to express them. Nevertheless, the outsider, an educator who
comes ignorant but well-meaning, cannot but become a "Savage Father"
who is potentially destructive for the population he means to educate.
The cultural distance that separates the teacher from his students is
too great. His substitution of explicit colonial forms with new
elements of European "high" culture, which he deems to be relevant to
his pupils, is plainly arrogant and bound to fail, and no less colonial
in its scope than what he is replacing.
In accordance with the above-quoted essays on the nature of filmic
language, images are given priority throughout The Savage Father. The
words "IMMAGINE PER IMMAGINE" (IMAGE BY IMAGE) recur in the
descriptions of memories or the workings of the imagination. The
phrase "IMMAGINE PER IMMAGINE" works almost as a panning action across
the landscape, and reflects for the reader a process similar to young
Davidson's re-acquisition of the conscience of his land and culture.
The European teacher, attempting to resolve the undoing of African
cultures caused by European colonialists, provides poetry as a
pedagogical tool. In the poetry that for the teacher is surely tied to
a sense of aesthetics to which violence is foreign, Davidson finds an
inventive potential that is truly liberatory in that it makes possible
his rebellion against the Europeans. And it is also this inventive use
of poetry that results in making evident the pedagogical distance
between Davidson and the teacher. Blind to the truly revolutionary
power of poetry and images, the teacher finds these results of its use
inexplicable and repulsive:
In your village, with your father, with your brothers, you betrayed
yourself, the one real Davidson in Africa, in the world! Excuse my
courage to jest ... But, at least ... you forgot that you were a modern
man, civil ... Oh, no, it was not your fault ... You fell back through
the centuries, you gave in. You drugged yourself, you participated in
rites that are no longer yours, and they are therefore at guilt. (?)
The conviction that Davidson and his companions have been conditioned
by a culture of colonialism that has made of them "uom[ini] modern[i],
civil[i]..." (modern men, civil), in all its negative connotations
illustrates the teacher's blindness to his own culture's colonizing
tendencies. The teacher does not afford Davidson and his companions
the option of "invention," the possibility to write themselves as new
subjects between worlds. While unable to fully return to a
pre-colonial culture, these young men represent the more interactive
reality of culture, and deny the purity of cultural direction required
by the teacher.
Juxtaposed to "The screenplay as a structure that want to be another
structure," The Savage Father takes on an increased value in Pasolini's
work. In the former, Pasolini posits a series of situations regarding
the nature of the screenplay. He identifies the screenplay as "the
concrete element in the relationship between film and literature," but
claims that his interests lie not in exploring the transformation of
the text into the "cinematographic work which it presupposes." "What
interests me," he goes on to say, "is the moment in which it can be
considered an autonomous technique, a work complete and finished in
itself." (187) By divorcing the script from the film, Pasolini
undermines the script's accepted secondary status to the "finished"
product, the film, a status that is further aggravated if the script in
question remains unproduced as a film. Pasolini accordingly elevates
the status and function of the script by proposing its form as "a
choice of narrative technique."
However, even within this "choice," Pasolini stresses that, in order
for the screenplay to maintain its value as a form of transition (or
transformation), it must retain its "continuous allusion to a
developing cinematographic work." (187) To make of the screenplay
simply a form in and of itself would be to merely insert it within
"traditional forms of literary writing." Of course, as Pasolini
himself acknowledges, the critique of this hybrid form will require its
own set of new analytical codes, ones that recognize both the
screenplay's typical aspects and its autonomy. Approaching a critique
of the screenplay with the tools of conventional literary criticism
would in fact deny the form's occult character, "the allusion to a
potential cinematographic work." Pasolini refers to this "element that
is not there" but which must be assumed as part of the critical code
and "ideologically presupposed" as a "desire for form." (188) That is
to say, the screenplay's tendency to representation in another medium
(cinematography) is an integral part of its structure/form. As such,
the reader of a screenplay is given a specific role, which is to lend
to a text "a visual completeness which it does not have, but at which
it hints." (189) At this point in his essay Pasolini gives an account
of the process of reading that he expects would result in approaching a
screenplay. I will not go into the language that Pasolini developed
for his filmic critique. Here it should suffice to say that the
screenplay and its signs propose and follow a double path of reading
and signification. On the one hand, the literary, in which the sign
leads to the meaning, and the other, the cinematographic, in which the
sign leads to the film, which leads to the visual sign, which leads to
the meaning. This simplified summary does not do justice to Pasolini's
detailed work, but here it is meant only to convey the fact that for
Pasolini himself the screenplay always contains that other form, which
is the visual. "The sign of the screenplay therefore not only
expresses a will of the form to become another above and beyond the
form; that is, it captures the form in movement [...] the word of the
screenplay is thus, contemporaneously, the sign of two different
structures, in-as-much as the meaning that it denotes is double: and it
belongs to two languages characterized by different structures."
(192-193)
The paradox reveals itself when "we are confronted by an odd fact: the
presence of a stylistic system where there is still no defined
linguistic system and where the structure is not conscious and
scientifically described." (194) Therefore, while the screenplay is a
form that moves toward another form, and its structure moves from
literary to cinematographic, the language of transition remains
unknown, or not-yet known. Making Pasolini's theoretical writings act
upon his artistic works enriches the latter while projecting the former
into more of a practical functionality. In folding theory and praxis
into each other, works such as The Savage Father begin to unveil their
transitional value. Beyond its inherent movement from screenplay to
film, The Savage Father can in fact be read as an analysis of the
transition from colonialism to decolonization to a postcolonial
condition, for it can certainly be said that colonialism contains a
structure that "want to be another structure." The unfolding of the
story within the screenplay narrates the passage from colonialism's
inheritance to postcolonial condition, and the search for a language
through which to express the transition.
Pasolini's answers throughout the book may be less effective and
adequate than the screenplay's function as a catalyst for them. Poetry
and filmic images are what Pasolini proposes, which are not a problem
within themselves. The problematic aspect of the teacher's remedy to
colonialism is that it is not much more than a sort of neo-colonialism
in the guise of progressive pedagogy. As well-intentioned as he may
be, the teacher's language and attitude are blind to a sense of
cultural determinism that hinders liberation and emphasizes colonial
paradigms.
Because The Savage Father represents the struggle for political and
cultural independence, and for a reassessment of positions, it must be
acknowledged as an ideologically charged structure of movement and
transition, and not merely as a frustrated cinematic effort. Read in
parallel to the situation of colonialism, it emphasizes that the
structures it discusses require adjustments in themselves and in our
perception of them as "structures that want to be other structures."
Just as colonialism contains within itself its own end, decolonization
and the eventual legitimization and expression of postcolonialism, the
screenplay contains its own, the film. While colonialism and the
screenplay may or may not become those other structures that they
contain, their effectiveness does not depend on the completion of those
expectations, but on the creative tension that they create and in our
own acknowledgment of the eruptive power of desire.
Pasquale Verdicchio
San Diego
Bibliography
Calvino, Italo. "Sade is Within Us" in Stanford Italian Review: Pier
Paolo Pasolini The Poetics of Heresy, Beverly Allen ed., II, 2, Fall
1982: 107-111.
Ferrero, Adelio. Il cinema di P. P. Pasolini. Venezia: Marsilio,
1977.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. A Desperate Vitality. Translated by Pasquale
Verdicchio. San Diego: Parentheses Writing Series, 1996.
____________. Heretical Empiricism. Edited by Louise K. Barnett;
Translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988.
____________. "Abiuria della Trilogia della vita" in Lettere Luterane.
Torino: Einaudi, 1976.
____________. Il padre selvaggio. Torino: Einaudi, 1975.